Bringing a contractor on the very first visit

[Kevin Samuels]

Hi, my wife and I have been looking at several properties in the Las Vegas Valley. We are constantly trying to find ways to streamline our process so we ca quickly decide if we are going to submit a bid or just move on to the next one. Do you think we should bring a contractor with us on our very first visit to the property or just go by ourselves and then decide if we even want to tackle the project. My hesitation to bringing a contractor on thhe first visit is because we don't want to waste his time by visiting all these properties and getting these quotes only to just turn the property down and move on. The pro I see is if we decide to bid on the house, we will already haven a someone there to give us a  good estimate so we know what we are about to get in to. I known this is an long winded but I appreciate the advice!

[Kyle B.]

@Kevin Samuels  bringing a contractor with you to help estimate repairs is ideal, but you mentioned the difficulty of it already... it tends to be a poor use of their time, particularly with re investors who only purchase a very small percentage of properties they see. From my experience, any legitimate contractor I've come across would not want to spend their time looking at a potential house I'm interested in buying, since the probability I will actually hire them to do work on that particular home is very small. I always bring them in after I have the property under contract/before I have closed.

What may be a good approach is to talk with a contractor, explain your business plan/model, and that you are looking for someone you can trust to build a long term relationship with and give a lot of business to you in the future. Then suggest you guys walk through a couple of properties you are considering as a purchase. That way, you can get a sense of what his pricing is on various projects. After seeing a few houses with him, you may start to get a good sense of what it would cost for the rehab and you can then apply it to future houses you see without your contractor their. Just a suggestion to get started. If the contractor really believes you could be a potential repeat customer, then I'd assume he'd take a couple hours of time to help you out in this regard.

Hope this helps,

Kyle